Frank Lloyd Wrightcore

Architecture in Helsinki

Genres are dumb (so is your face). But Architecture in Helsinki won my enduring love for their MySpace self-characterization tagline: "Melodramatic Popular Song/Ghettotech/Jungle." And jokes aside, it's kind of bizarrely accurate. "Heart It Races," from the new record, Places Like This (out on radder-than-pizza label Polyvinyl), sounds like what would result if M.I.A. and Nelly Furtado suddenly became the unlikeliest of best friends and made beats in the high school parking lot. This is a band, after all, that's built like a screaming neon hydra of capital-Y Youth, the kind that makes sweaty marketing execs cream their underpants. Encompassing every obvious and obscure musical point of interest that currently occupies your entire first string of friends, Architecture in Helsinki's body of work verily hums with this-minute-ness and coke-brain frenetics in the same way that Since I Left You (the work of fellow Australians the Avalanches) did in 2001. They bring the dance party (of course) and the indie-rock self-possession (der) and the gifted-class-intellectual panache (to show off) so aggressively that if Places Like This were the record to birth the band into mass-market viability, the whole messy indie-pop dance scene would turn to refreshing formalism for sustenance. Oh, also: YACHT rules! Radder than pizza!